Personal

How about 32-hour days?

yodaears.jpg
This isn’t Lucy’s best attempt at Yoda ears, but it’s pretty close

Is it too greedy to ask for longer days? I really could use more hours. Sure, it would take longer for holidays to roll around and for vacations to commence, but once they did, you’d have more time to enjoy them.

Given eight more hours in a day, I’d probably use it to read. (And spend time with my husband and child, of course. I’m not that selfish.) I shudder, though, at the stack of reading material that continues to grow next to my bed. Of books, magazines, newsletters. It doesn’t help that any trip I make to the bookstore seems to require me to buy something. I may be able to walk into J. Crew and not buy a sweater, but to walk into Schulers and not buy a book just doesn’t seem right.

Right now I’m in the midst of reading a bunch of magazines — Better Homes and Gardens (because I have both a home and a garden), Adoptive Families (because I adopted a baby), Parenting (because I’m now a parent) and Health (because I care about my health). Magazines are easy enough to digest. I can read them in bits at a time.

It’s the books that I struggle to find time for. And that I crave time for. Especially the one I’m reading right now. Crescent was written by Diana Abu-Jaber. I read her novel Arabian Jazz over the summer and really enjoyed it. But this one is different. It’s richer, more lush. The contrast in settings probably has something to do with it. From upstate NY to LA. That would lush things up a lot. Her language is amazing. It’s both a novel and a poem. Sometimes I have to re-read sentences just to be sure I really read what I thought I did. Amazing writing. Read it if you get the chance.